"Daisy Jones & the Six:" a Reluctant Disappointment

The title may sound extreme, but it’s unfortunately true.

I started “Daisy Jones & the Six” with the highest expectations. Following a ferocious five-star read of “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” and a mediocre three stars for “Malibu Rising,” I was hoping that “Daisy Jones & the Six” would bring Taylor Jenkins Reid back to the five-star author she is known to be.

Maybe it was the high expectations. Perhaps it was the order in which I read these novels. But whatever it may be, “Daisy Jones & the Six” fell short.

The writing style helped us understand these characters better. I felt as though I could hear them as they spoke — the vernacular they would use and the flow at which they would speak rattling through my brain with each character switch. Honestly, the interview-style writing kept this book from falling to a similar ranking to “Malibu Rising.”

Along with the style, the contradictions between the characters’ memory recollections are an excellent touch, similar to the reality of interviewing multiple people about a single event — I felt as though I was reading an article from Rolling Stone.

The characters and their development are where I pause on the praise. We really only saw Daisy and Billy develop throughout the novel. Karen and Graham were given the spotlight on occasion, but what about the rest of the characters? Camila stayed the same, a knowing wife turning a blind eye. Eddie never ceased to glare at Billy every chance he got. Pete barely had a say in anything. Rod was constantly walking on eggshells around everyone. So where is the development? Sure, it can be difficult to have each character go through an arc in one story, and the story is also being told in the past tense, showing the events that had already happened. But had no one else learned from their mistakes in the past? I find it difficult to understand looking back on this book. Why have so many voices in a story if we are to only care about a few of them?

That is the biggest problem I have with multiple perspectives in a book. In “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” we only saw how Evelyn and Monique changed during the novel, but at least it was both characters. In “Malibu Rising,” we got the perspectives of too many people with too much personality and too little focus on most of them.

The worst part? I so desperately wanted to love this book.

Maybe going into a book with high expectations is the beginning of its downfall. I should have learned by now that unrealistic expectations never work out in life and literature. So, with that in mind, I gave “Daisy Jones & the Six” a reluctant four stars. Hopefully, I can change this review if I decide to reread the novel, but for now, she stands where she stands.